There are few weeks in which the news media do not announce some great breakthrough in medical or biological science, usually inferring some immediate benefit to mankind. Alas, the promise of these benefits is nearly always premature and leads to disappointment. However, the frequency of the reports does indeed reflect an astonishing rate of new discovery in a field of great complexity.

Television claims to report reality but largely creates its own reality. There is very little autonomy, largely because the competition for ‘market share’ is so intense. The pressure to fill the space is strong; hence, it must be something for everyone. Everyone is looking over their shoulder to see what their rivals are saying; to know what to say, you need to know what everyone else is saying. This leads to homogenization and political conformity. Politics and economics lead to an internal censorship. ‘News’ is selective, favouring the extremes, blood, sex, crime, riots, not what ordinary people experience. Television calls for dramatization and the exaggeration of the importance of events. In debate, the fast, superficial thinker is favoured over the original and profound. Can you refuse to talk on television? There is a desire to be seen that is exploited.

This paper begins from a definition of the modern polity as characterized by the mutual embedding of politics and media. It sketches the consequences of this state of affairs for 20th century notions of citizenship, arguing that unprecedented knowledge goes hand in hand with more or less complete inefficacy on the part of most citizens. This is the more marked since the ownership of media, defended by those at an advantage as a matter of freedom from partisanship and favour, is now more concentrated than ever before. This bodes ill for citizens whose only foreseeable recourse is to keep up the good but slight work of criticism and intellectual independence.

Problem-based learning (PBL), besides a number of advantages, also has drawbacks. It makes it very difficult for students to identify with a good teacher, and aims, rather, at identification with a peer group. Therefore, it seems more suited for adolescents than for young adults capable of secondary identification. Furthermore, this form of staff–student contact, i.e. the teaching group, does not motivate staff to share knowledge with the students. The knowledge acquired through PBL tends to remain unorganized. It is therefore more suited for disciplines in which a compilation of factual knowledge is important (e.g. medicine) than where a systematic approach is needed (e.g. statistics).

The 30 years between the 1960s and the 1980s of the 20th century are recalled today as a golden age of European theatre. They seem to have revived, continued and re-created the previous golden age brought about by the historical theatre avant-garde movements during the first decades of the 20th century (approximately 1900–1930). Then, Adolphe Appia, Jacques Copeau, Edward Gordon Craig, Leopold Jessner, Vsevolod Meyerhold, Max Reinhardt, Alexander Tairov, Evgeni Vakhtangov and others had striven for what they called a retheatricalization of theatre.

This paper deals with the reversal of the hierarchy between text and performance, which can be traced back to the turn of the 20th century. In particular, two possibilities of how to redefine the relationship between text and performance are explored and discussed. Both these possibilities have played a prominent role in German theatre since the 1970s and are modelled after distinct cultural paradigms, namely the paradigm of sacrificial ritual and the paradigm of play/game. The leading questions of the investigation are: what purpose does it serve to take recourse to these paradigms and how has it affected the performance as well as writing for the theatre?

The Irish literary revival at the beginning of the last century established the concept of ‘house’ as a symbol of ‘nation’ in dramatic writing. Strangers to the house thus took on the mantle of imperialist forces whose colonial project, practices and values had to be resisted and expelled. The allegorical situations of houses and strangers in theatre foreshadowed revolution and eventual independence for the country decades later. Contemporary Irish playwrights continue to use the house/stranger, familiar/foreign dichotomies as templates for their exploration of the current state of the ‘nation’, but they are also beginning to explore the idea that ‘strangeness’ might be a condition that should be embraced to ensure the future health of that nation.

The Israeli theatre has frequently employed the Hebrew Bible as a source for theatrical performances. Analysing three such performances, this article shows that the Bible, with its charged ideological implications for the establishment of the state of Israel, has perhaps somewhat unexpectedly inspired avant-garde productions that have frequently criticized the accepted ideological and aesthetic norms. The first of the three performances analysed is Hanoch Levin's play based on the book of Job called ‘The Torments of Job’ (Yisorei Iov), which Levin directed at the Cameri theatre in 1981. The second is the play ‘Jehu’ by Gilead Evron, directed by Hanan Snir at the Habima National Theatre in 1992, and the third is the ‘Bible Project’ directed by Rina Yerushalmi, which consists of two independent, but interrelated productions: ‘And He Said And He Was Walking’ (Va Yomer Va Yelech), which premiered in 1996, and ‘And They Bowed. And He Feared’ (Va Yishtachu. Va Yerra) which premiered in 1998.

Sju tre (1999) is the most controversial theatre production in Sweden in modern times. Lars Norén, a well-known playwright and director, staged a dialogue involving three real convicts, of whom two were outspoken Nazis. Shortly after the last performance, the latter two men were involved in a bank robbery in which two policemen were killed. These scandalous events are discussed from three different perspectives, all, however, revolving around the uncertain boundaries between aesthetic, ethical, and political issues. By virtue of its performative impact, the theatrical event proved to be directly linked with critical questions of democracy, although conceivably at the expense of the artistic integrity of the director and the theatre as creator of public opinion.

The aim of the paper is to show the impact contemporary drama has had on Polish theatre during the last 50 years. In this period, there were two innovative phases in Polish drama, both having a different impact on the theatre. After 1956, political changes allowed for noticeable transformations in the dramatic and stage conventions, which up to then were dominated by socialist realism. After 1989, political changes brought a few promising debuts, as well as new topics and means of expression, which had been almost completely absent from the Polish stage. At the same time, this paper tries to show in which respect Polish dramaturgy maintained its national uniqueness, while being influenced by world drama.

The Russian theatre has undergone several phases of development since the demarcation from the past, as represented by Alexander Vampilov. To begin with, the theatre preferred dramatization of modern literature, but this gave way to consideration of the paradoxes of life, often absurdist. Then, with the end of the Soviet system, there were the chernukha, black plays, particularly of Shipenko, Ugarov and Knjazev. More recently still, the ‘scenic reading’ of plays explored the suitability of various life-conflicts for drama. ‘August’ by Timophei Khmeljev concerned the inhabitants of an old dacha near Moscow. The pattern was related to Chekhov and Nietzsche. Kazantsev's ‘That this world’ and Razumovskaya's ‘Biography’ concerned life after death. Alexander Stroganov's ‘Ornithology’ relates human and bird life. Russian drama is in a very active and explorative phase, trying to catch a lost happiness.

This paper traces the presence of fin de siècle Wilde in the postmodernist fin de millénaire a century after his death. He is still alive, not only with scholars and critics but, more importantly, with a wider public and with writers and film makers who keep re-inventing him in their novels, plays and films, radicalizing him into a postmodernist avant la lettre. This ‘wilder’ Wilde is studied here in recent biopics, bioplays and biofictions, such as Peter Ackroyd's The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde or Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, as well as in re-writings of his texts, such as in Joe Orton's What the Butler Saw or Mark Ravenhill's Handbag.

This paper critically reviews seven productions at Avignon 2000. The first was ‘Le chant perdu des petit riens’. This corresponds to visual and tactile perception bound to the hand and skin. ‘Le Petit Köchel’ is a story of Mozart devoured by the Heifetz sisters, two virtuoso violinists. The non-lyrical dry writing is made up of very dry statements that distance the observer; the result seems to resolve into an attractive ‘skin effect’ and a repulsive ‘bone effect’. In the ‘Ruines romaines’ relations between people are a field of ruins; individuals are obsessed by bad feelings and disgust. Bones stick out to signify the excessive fixity of ideals. In ‘Terres promises’ the enigma of textual and scenic images overwhelms the spectator; the subject wants to be guided by an organizing principle, the resemblances are explored at multiple levels. In ‘La Peau d'Elisa’ the relationship of flesh and clothing is emphasized; the main character can only communicate after eye contact. ‘Andromaque’ is a modern interpretation of a great classic. Finally ‘La Mouette’ shows the heroine immersed in feathers from a disembowelled pillow; the ambiguity of meaning is emphasized and the production is maintained between intellectuality and sensuality.